Monday, 13 January 2014

Top Weekend at Top Drawer

WOW! What a wonderfully inspirational, jam-packed, fun-filled, panic inducing weekend we have had visiting Top Drawer at Earls Court in London. With only 4 months to go until we have to set up our very first trade show stand at PG LIVE, we thought a research trip to see how the professionals do it was very much in order.

Mixing business with pleasure the night before the show

We were both overwhelmed by the size of the show and by the enormous amount of talent and competition that was there. It quite frankly scared us half to death, and we soon started to regret the second bottle of Lebanese wine we had quaffed the night before when we realised how much work we had to do! Here is a short run down of Team Rosie and Radish's show highlights ...

As far as fun, quirky, colourful and interesting stands go, it doesn't get much better than this from the very talented Laura Skilbeck. If our stand looks anywhere near as good as this at PG LIVE we will be very happy! It looked totally fab...

and we loved this little dude!

Someone we were looking forward to meeting was the lovely Ilona, the lady behind I Drew This (one of our favourite greeting card publishers!) With such bright, cute illustration it is hard not to be drawn to her gorgeous card ranges.

We both fell in love with the beautiful simplicity of the pencil sharpen range by Ruth Jackson. It was great to see her hard at work at her stand, hand finishing her cards with pencil sharpens. AMAZING!

Other highlights included the trusty Rifle Paper Company delighting our eyes with the ultimate in floral stationery ...

Away from the Greeting Card section the highlight for us were these animal rugs by Sew Heart Felt. They were a proper show stopper, and definitely too good to stand on!

After looking around we used our time wisely and spent a few hours brainstorming and finalising the plan of action for our trade show in May. We have 3 new ranges to illustrate, catalogues and sales materials to design and 4 metres of wall space to fill. AHHHHH its going to be a busy few months!